Tuesday, February 16, 2016

You have NonStop solutions but who you gonna call!

A
chance forced detour out on the highway reminded me of just how important good
service is - for the NonStop community there are many options when it comes to
service and I suspect there will be even greater demand for services in the
future. Think for a moment about Hybrids and NonStop as Software!

Driving the many miles we do, attending one conference
or another, we probably spend more time in car service bays than most. Throw
into the mix the need to accommodate extreme temperature changes that living
next to the continental divide creates, and the expenses climb steadily through
any given year. Seeking the assistance of service managers isn’t restricted to
where we live either, as we have been forced, on occasion, to pull into garages
all across the western states of America. Service, particularly when it comes
to cars, is something Margo and I know a lot about. As much as it really hurts
to own up to such familiarity with car service centers across the country, it’s
our bank account that tends to suffer.

This post is being written after having just returned from Las Vegas and where
in a few days’ time, we head to New Orleans for the ATMIA US Conference 2016,
where the theme is “Connecting Consumers and their Money to the ATM.” As the
original “cash dispensing machines,” the ATM “remains a convenient and trusted
self-service channel.” Last week I was in Las Vegas and Sin City is fueled by
cash and you can’t escape the presence of ATMs or for that matter, Bill Breakers,
but as for trusted self-service … these days, it’s almost as if service has
lost out to products and applications. How often do we hear today that yes,
there’s an app for that!

By chance, we learnt of an app provided by the Colorado Department of Transport
(CDOT) and we installed the app. Turned out, it was a good thing we did. CDOT
was very forthcoming in telling us that the main arterial highway connecting
the west to Denver was closed in both directions. A major rock fall had sent
boulders crashing onto the highway blocking lanes and causing damage to the
roadway.

Turned out we had to follow a 130 mile detour to the south but even as the
miles added up, we were thankful for the service being provided by CDOT. While
I have written many column inches on products available to the NonStop
community I may not have given enough attention to the many services on offer
from the same vendors. Nor have I written about vendors we know very well who
are thriving today even though they started out providing services long before
they brought products to market.

“Our origins are deeply rooted in the services business – the products you see
today grew from observations we made while providing services,” recalls
OmniPayments, Inc. CEO, Yash Kapadia. For those of us who know Yash well, this
comes as no surprise as it was the opportunity to consult with customers worldwide
that gave him the impetus to create the modules that eventually led to the
creation of OmniPayments.

Likewise, at DataExpress, according to CEO, Billy Whittington, “Our roots are
firmly anchored in services. Our technical competence has always been in moving
data, whether via IBM products or third party such as NET/MASTER File Transfer
or NDM/Connect:Direct, and it was this competence that opened the door to
consulting. That’s where we started and how we gained our first customer. Our
move into products came about when we saw an opportunity and today, with
DataExpress NonStop (DXNS), our services offerings are focused on being
complementary to our product offerings.”

Origins, and indeed, roots in services and consulting; an obvious path to
gaining the credibility needed to sell products. Not surprisingly, the more I
talked to the NonStop vendor community the more this became a recognizable
pattern, and for good reason. When you place experienced people in front of
real problems and the requirements raised are seen as having universal appeal,
the transition to building a tool or a utility or even the foundation for a
comprehensive product set, seems the obvious way forward. It’s a characteristic
of really smart people that they don’t want to do anything more than once so
helping themselves out by developing a tool, utility or product seems an
obvious path to follow.

That was many years ago for most of the NonStop vendors I talked to. Times
change and now, with so many discussions around transformations, hybrid
computers, clouds and the infrastructure that is typically required, most data
centers where NonStop systems are present aren’t equipped to install,
integrate, and deploy the many tools, utilities and products that are involved.
Even the simplest of utilities requires hooks into existing business logic at
some point and that requires choices to be made. Not for the faint-hearted is
deploying a new product on an operational NonStop system. Services from
established vendors are now welcomed by almost everyone in the NonStop
community.

“Our success lies in us providing services, particularly into emerging markets,
where the primary vendor doesn’t always have the skillsets readily available –
our solutions are easy to install but every customer needs help in establishing
rules, best practices and even connectivity with their business partners, all
of which are well catered for by the staff on hand at OmniPayments,” said Yash.
Increasingly, this has become the expectation of enterprises new to NonStop. As
the NonStop vendor community look to broaden their presence in different
markets, moving out of an original niche and embracing something new becomes
less daunting.

“At DataExpress, we are exceptionally strong in the
Financial Services market segment but more recently we have turned our
attention to Healthcare. We are looking to develop a foothold in this market
segment where we anticipate growth coming from our DataExpress Open Platform
(DXOP) product,” added Whittington of DataExpress. What DataExpress has
experienced from offering services is that even among the biggest banks in
America, the need to provide consulting services, sometimes spanning many
years, isn’t unusual and for DataExpress, such multi-year opportunities help
develop a very strong bond between user and vendor.

Recently, I was exploring the
subject of services with comForte CTO, Thomas Burg. The NonStop community knows
all too well of how comForte’s roots date back to
the late 1980’s / early 1990’s where the focus too was on services and custom
development for “Tandem” Customers. From that services work sprang the ideas
for some of the products we all are very familiar with.I had just completed a post to the comForte blog, The End to Security as an Afterthought: 2016 Trends in which Burg had told me that, “we are driven to
provide as many services as we can, with or without our products, as security
is such a demanding pursuit. With these latest service deliverables, we
consider our main drivers to be providing value to the customer.”

Furthermore, said Burg, providing these services
benefits greatly when we tap the skills of others and recently, “We decided to
work with Knightcraft. Principal consultant, Greg Swedosh, is someone we have
come to appreciate as we know that he has plenty of experience in working in
the PCI area. We can benefit, of course, whenever we can complement our current
service offerings with even more expertise and Greg brings with him a strong
background in Safeguard, general NonStop security and vendor security
products.”

Today, the services provided by Burg and his team at comForte can be obtained
directly from comForte, whether as part of a product purchase from comForte or
independently, even where there are no comForte products present. Leveraging
the security expertise of comForte and its associates is a service that will
only grow in importance as, when it comes to security, we all need as much help
as we can find.

The need for the NonStop community to involve vendors providing services will
only increase following recent HPE disclosures of their product roadmaps. HPE
Executives have been noticeably vocal about where they are headed and while the
information disclosed to date is very encouraging for the NonStop community,
many NonStop users will definitely be looking for help from their partners.
“Like other vendors within the NonStop community, we are following the HPE
announcement for NonStop X and Hybrids and it is our expectation that the need
for services from DataExpress will likely grow considerably,” DataExpress’s
Whittington told me. “We are prepared to meet that challenge head-on.”

It’s an old saying, but still pertinent all the same. Service can differentiate
products – those products where good service is also provided often end up
gaining the upper hand in the marketplace. And rightly so; it just makes sense
to work with those vendors who can provide services as needed. The NonStop
community is well supported by vendors able to provide services and as much as
it may be the untold story, should the NonStop community expand in the coming
years, as I sense it will, then simply knowing who to call for that expertise
will make future growth a whole lot easier.